The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

by Laura Lippman (ed) (epub)

Larocque nodded. “Was that your son? That boy?”

  “Don’t worry about him.” His accent had thickened, it sounded like, and Larocque was conscious of how the years in California had softened and lengthened his own speech so that he sounded to himself as if he were drawling, floating his words on the open air like balloons. They stood for a minute, Larocque feeling the cold working into his clothes, up his sleeves and down his collar. There was something threatening in Pelletier’s silence, the way he held his body canted to one side as if hiding something behind his hip. He said, “What are you doing home?”

  Larocque lifted a shoulder. “Henry died.”

  “Okay,” the other man said, as if that was an acceptable excuse. “Closing up the house? Selling out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pelletier nodded, his face shadowed and unreadable. “I see.”

  “I thought I would, you know. Come and go. That’s what I thought when I started back.”

  “Yeah? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. It ain’t the same. Maybe with the old man gone it’s just a place.”

  “You should think about that.” Pelletier was breathing heavily, like he was working up to doing something. Hitting him, maybe? He had on a parka that thickened his middle and a white hat with a wide brim. Larocque couldn’t help thinking that the Pelletier he had known would have knocked a hat like that off a stranger just to see it roll in the dirt.

  “I’m surprised you’re still here, far as that goes. You got married?”

  “Yeah, Jennifer Harrington.”

  “I remember her.”

  “Do you?”

  He did remember her, as one of those high school girls with old-lady haircuts who seemed in all the particulars of their appearance and demeanor to be already in some henlike middle age.

  Pelletier’s chest moved in and out. “Why are you here?”

  “I said. I’m here because my father died. I needed a place to live.”

  “Yeah? You should think about that.”

  Larocque thought they were somehow having two different conversations. When Pelletier turned, Larocque climbed into the cab of the truck and drove away. He drove a wide circle to the T-Bird on West Street to get the cigarettes he’d forgotten. As he walked through the dark lot to his car, his hands were shaking and he cradled the carton in his arms like a child. The wind picked at the hem of his jacket and he whirled in place, thinking he would find somebody behind him.

  A week after that Larocque was coming out of the One Stop with a bag of dog food under his arm to find Pelletier standing next to the pickup looking at the dogs. Carrie was sitting in the open door while the Belgian puppy pushed her snout under Pelletier’s stiff hand.

  “I didn’t know you kept dogs.”

  Carrie looked from Pelletier to Larocque, who nodded. “They were Henry’s.”

  Carrie said, “They’re trackers. Find anything. Lost kids, people.” The young Belgian stood tall, looked from face to face, alert.

  “Is that right,” Pelletier said, and Larocque dropped the heavy bag in the truck bed and got in beside Carrie. To Larocque, Pelletier said, “You with the police now?”

  Carrie smiled, “No, he’s not, but he helps run the dogs when they’re looking for someone.”

  “Looking for someone? For who?”

  As he started the car, Larocque saw Pelletier’s face change, grow purple as if a hand had closed on his throat. A white vein stood out on his neck. Larocque said, “We gotta go,” and left Pelletier standing by Roxbury Street, his hands jammed in his pockets.

  Carrie watched his face as they drove. “Who was that?”

  Larocque shook his head. “Nobody. Don’t talk to him.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Is that so?”

  He let his breath go in an agitated hiss. “He’s just somebody I used to know. He’s just . . .” He was conscious of her watching his face, and he felt heat spreading across his cheeks and up to his hairline. “He’s not a good guy.” He drove too fast until they reached the park around the reservoir and Carrie put her hand over his and he nodded and slowed down. He thought he’d feel safer under the white pines and balsam, but as the road narrowed he felt crowded by the looming trees. He wondered if he should have stayed in the desert, with nothing but the sky overhead, a ribbon of stars at night and sometimes the pale, bruised face of the moon.

  A child disappeared, a ten-year-old girl who had been camping with her father on the Ashuelot River. He had gone to the store to get marshmallows and smokes and when he’d come back she was gone. Carrie took the dogs out, and Larocque waited with the man and a park ranger. The man told them her name, Allyson, and said they’d been driving around earlier and he’d shown the girl the covered bridge down in Winchester and he was afraid she was heading there, that she’d been fascinated by the fact of what seemed to be a house built right over the river, with a roof and a wooden floor. The man sat smoking at a picnic table and stole terrified glances at the river behind him. Larocque stood some distance away, trying to be respectful, but some secret part of him wondered if he would be blamed or accused. He said her name, Allyson Briese, to himself and wondered if that was a strong enough name to be the name of a survivor.

  Carrie came back after an hour with a state trooper and said the dogs had made a wide circle back to Pine Street a half mile away. She stood with one hand on the man’s shoulder but looked meaningfully at Larocque, and when they were alone in her cruiser she stroked the dogs with a gloved hand and said the girl must have gotten into somebody’s car. She touched the dogs in turn and presented them each a piece of hot dog from a plastic bag, telling him (as she had before) about how frustrated dogs could get when they couldn’t find the person they were searching for. The tracking dogs at the towers on 9/11, she said, had felt it was their fault when they couldn’t find survivors in the collapsed buildings. A dog could take on the guilt of the people around it, she said.

  That night he climbed through a confused welter of burning rubble and jutting steel, looking for the dogs. He woke up knowing he’d have the dream again, wondering what it meant that he was the one searching, digging through the ash, ruining his hands on the white-hot shards of steel looking for the dog that would save him.

  Two days later Carrie met him at the house, the lights of her cruiser going and the dogs already leashed. He locked up his tools in the truck and jumped in and they were moving, the familiar landscape transformed by riding next to her, cars scattering at the intersections and people turning to watch them pass.

  Carrie told him a state trooper had gone to question a man about the disappearance of Allyson Briese and they’d fought, the man struggling for the trooper’s gun and running off into the state park north of Winchester.

  “Did he get the gun?”

  She motioned for him to be quiet and listened to the radio chatter, otherworldly metallic pips and shrieks, alien and indecipherable, that Carrie understood but that to Larocque seemed to announce some emergency so dire that there was no way to prepare for it or survive it when it came.

  They got out on 119 south of the park and walked by state police cars, ambulances, news vans. There were circles of police in military dress, wearing combat boots and helmets. The breeze rose and he walked crabwise, trying to give it his back. Men and dogs squinted into the wind, and a helicopter moved overhead, rotors pounding. Carrie held a twelve-gauge Winchester in both hands. She went to stand with a group of men who had a map spread on the hood of a car, listening to a briefing. She was serious, somber, her mouth set in a way he hadn’t seen before. Afterward she showed Larocque lines on a map and pointed into the woods, and he brought the dogs alongside the state trooper’s car. There were black bullet holes punched in the metal of the door and the windshield was shattered.

  Somebody brought a paper bag over to where the dogs stood ready, and Carrie reached in with a gloved hand and took out a wide-brim white hat. She looked at Larocque and he nodded yes.

  The wind died a
s they walked, but the sky was woven with threads of blue and black. He tried to talk to Carrie about Gifford, couldn’t think of a way to go at it. They were making their way uphill slowly through the hemlock and red oak, watching the dogs as they moved, tongues hanging. Masie was out front, running a zigzag course, and Carrie said, “She’s quartering,” showing Larocque a side-to-side motion with her hand that was the dog trying to find the scent trail. When they reached the firebreak, the radio at Carrie’s hip crackled and a voice told them to wait where they were, so Carrie stopped and opened the pack she carried to get out a plastic bottle and let the dogs drink water from her hand. Larocque sat heavily on a cracked, blackened stump and breathed through his mouth. He saw Carrie looking at him, a question in her eyes.

  He said, “I was a kid when I knew Gifford. I don’t know. Not kids, but. Seventeen?” He looked into the woods ahead of them, the dark spaces between the trees. “We would drive around, talk all this crazy talk, all these things we were going to do.” He dropped his head, unable to look at her while he talked about himself. “Henry, my father. I don’t know what he ever said about me. I can’t remember anymore if I acted wrong because he hated me or if I really did wear him down with the things I did. He was just angry all the time after my mother left. So what do you do when your father thinks you’re no good? I guess I thought I’d be bad, be what he thought I was.”

  She put away the water and picked up the gun and stood waiting by a mottled white rock that was like the back of some sea creature buried in the hill. He said, “I think when you’re a boy that age, maybe you just need something to be, even if it isn’t real. Every minute you’re play-acting, you know? We’d drive around breaking things, sneaking into places.” His voice got quiet. “And we had a knife. Then we had a gun.”

  Carrie stood with the shotgun at port arms, as if ready to stand him off. Her face was so pale in the cold light she looked almost blue. She said, “Did you use them?”

  “No, no, but . . .” The dogs went to stand by Carrie, and he sat alone on his stump and felt something clench inside him, some fist that grabbed his heart to be alone, separated from them just that few feet. “I think I knew something was going on. I knew if we kept going out something would happen.”

  “Did you want something to happen?”

  He was still. “We took a girl, we brought her out here.” He thought about how that sounded. “We didn’t take her, you know, we just came out here. We were drinking. She was drinking a lot.”

  “You got her drunk.”

  “We were all drunk. We started at the Pub, and then we just . . .”

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “No.” He shook his head, emphatic. His face was hot, sweat running from the hair at his collar though the day was cold and there were circles of gray snow shaped to the shadows of the rocks.

  He looked over finally at Carrie, but she faced away, holding tight to Poke’s collar. “Was she afraid?” Her voice was small, thin, and it was strange how she seemed like a very young girl herself, lost in her shapeless parka and holding the outsized shotgun in her small hands.

  “No. I don’t think so. We were just kids, getting drunk in the woods. She was older than us, I think. I don’t think she thought, I mean, maybe she thought we were going to fool around, all of us. Hell, I don’t know. But I could see he was thinking about it. Gifford.” He got a flash of his friend standing in the dark, a few feet away from where he and the girl sat with their backs against a tree. The girl laughing, her teeth white. Gifford had been looking off into the black woods and Larocque knew he was wondering if anybody knew where they were. “I couldn’t drink like that, like they were. I went back to the truck and passed out. When I woke up, Gifford was driving me home. He said he’d dropped off the girl at her place.” He had the thought that this was the most he’d spoken to Carrie, the most he’d spoken out loud to anyone in years, and it was just this terrible thing that he thought he’d never tell anyone.

  “A couple of days later it was all over the news, the girl. That she was missing. I hid for a few days, but I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting in Lindy’s and in comes Gifford and I could see in his eyes, I could just see it. I had the papers open in front of me and he just stood there looking at me. I never saw anybody look like that. I don’t know how to say what it was like. Like his skull was coming through his skin. Like he wasn’t a regular human being.”

  “Did the police talk to him?”

  He had to stop looking at her, and turned to see only the trees and the rocks and the gunmetal sky. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I left. I moved out to California to work for my Uncle Ronnie hanging sheetrock. Ronnie went out of business and came home, but I just stayed out there and found work. If Henry hadn’t died, I’d have never come back.”

  Carrie started to say something else, but then he heard her make a small noise, a grunt or cough, and turned to see Pelletier standing over her as she fell, the barrel of the pistol in his hands and the butt out, like the bell of a hammer, and one wrist clamped in a steel cuff. Larocque stumbled over the white rock to get to her and Pelletier had the Winchester pump out of her slack hands and he climbed awkwardly away onto the hump of boulder. The dogs whined and barked and the young Belgian made a noise low in his throat. Pelletier pointed the pump gun and Larocque grabbed the dog’s collar and held him down, crouching by Carrie’s body.

  Pelletier said, “See? What did you think would happen?”

  “You killed her.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Are you asking or telling?”

  Larocque said, “That woman from the bar. And more, right? That girl at the campground, Allyson. Didn’t you?” He wanted to touch Carrie’s face but was afraid he would know then she was dead.

  Gifford made a noise that might have been laughing, but his eyes were red and full. “You left. How do you know what I did?”

  “I knew you. That’s why I had to go. I knew even before it happened. The things we did, it wasn’t enough for you. You were going to hurt somebody.”

  “Then why did you come back?”

  “I told you. Henry died. I never thought you’d still be here.”

  Larocque watched Gifford’s fingers twitch on the trigger and his head swivel crazily around, searching the hill around them. “I can’t find her. The girl I took. I knew it was around here somewhere, but I can’t find it anymore.” He gestured drunkenly with the barrel of the gun. “There was the rock, the trees. Some kind of hollow where she was. It’s all different.”

  It was getting darker. Gifford wiped at the sweat above his eyes and left a gritty smear. He pointed the gun at Larocque. “You can make those dogs find her.”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Gifford.”

  “You left me here with these things in my head. You left me here.” He lifted the gun barrel and awkwardly racked the slide, a bright green shell arcing out into the dirt. “Why didn’t you stop me? You could see what I was going to do. How could you leave me alone with that?” He was crying now. “Wasn’t you my friend?”

  “I’m sorry.” Larocque did feel a kind of sorrow in that second, and his breath caught in his throat. Pelletier brought the Winchester to his shoulder and tensed. Carrie jerked upright, her eyes wide and white bark stuck to her bloody hair, and brought her hand up with her service pistol in it. Pelletier started, opened his mouth to say something, but she shot him three times and he stepped back off the rock and collapsed into the dead leaves.

  Three summers later a group of young kids from a college in Boston came to shoot a movie. One of the crew was a local girl, and she asked Carrie if they’d bring the dogs and let them be filmed. Larocque came with her to stand at the pickup and drink coffee, but when they saw him getting Masie out of the truck they asked if he’d be in the film. Carrie looked at him and lowered her head to smile, and he said sure and winked at her. The director, a short, skinny kid who wore a suit jacket and vest over faded jeans, told him the movie was called Satan’s Kingdom,
after the wilderness area down in Northfield, and Laroque said he knew all about it. They wanted him to stand with the dogs at the edge of the forest and pantomime fear when something came out of the woods, some horror that they would put in later through a process Larocque couldn’t understand.

  They asked him to walk the dogs up and down John Hill Road and introduced him to a girl, a small, slim girl holding a birch rod who would come through the woods at him. She’d tap the rod against the trees so he would know where to look, and he was supposed to throw his hands up and yell when she reached the tree line.

  He ran the Belgians up and down the narrow verge of the road, and when the girl began to tap the stick, Poke came up short and peered into the woods. The kids in the crew looked at each other and nodded their heads, and the tapping got louder, and Larocque stepped close to the dogs and looked nervously past them into the dark trees.

  The tapping seemed to come from everywhere, a hollow sound that echoed in the spaces between his ribs and made the hair stand up on his neck like the quills of some startled animal, and he ran his hand over the back of his head and felt sweat at his temples.

  The sound grew louder and there was a distinct rustling from the pines. Larocque backed across the road, and the kid in the vest followed him with the camera, murmuring encouragement to Larocque, or maybe to himself. Larocque tripped backing up and went down hard on his haunches. The dogs whined.

  When the girl’s stick smacked the base of a telephone pole at the verge of the road, the long white rod poking from the shadow like a disembodied bone, Larocque screamed and covered his head with his hands. He dropped to his knees and sobbed, his mouth open. Masie howled, and Poke took it up, lifting his long head and closing his eyes to sing the man’s grief. A minute went by, then two, and the director stopped filming and lifted the camera away. The girl, who had emerged from the woods with a red leaf stuck in her hair, dropped her stick and crossed the road and put one hand on Larocque’s back. Without lifting his head, he put one hand on hers while his tears and spit darkened the asphalt.